Earlier this month, on stage at the Tribeca Festival, I got to interview actress Alison Williams.

For people around my age, and particularly those of us who spent part of early adulthood striving in a city, she's kind of a peer.

On the show Girls, Alison Williams was Marnie, a character who was ambitious and talented and a good friend of

Lena Dunham's main character, Hannah. Marnie was also selfish and totally unselfaware,

and even when she acknowledged her faults, she managed to give herself compliments.

I can admit that I don't have like like, a lot of other things going on.

Currently living in my mom's home gym and my band broke up.

But the thing is, I still have a lot to give. A lot.

Another thing you need to know about Marnie, if you never watched girls or if it's been a while,

she had this tendency whenever a microphone was present to try to grab it.

In the most famous example of this, Marnie showed up at a work party for her ex-boyfriend Charlie,

and she made some congratulatory remarks into a microphone and then start singing a very slow, very cringy rendition of stronger, a rap song by Kanye West.

Work it, make it do it makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. That, that that that don't kill me can only make me stronger.

I need you to hurry up now because I can't wait much longer.

Alison Williams was so good at playing Marnie that some of us started to wonder how much of the character was a character.

A big question at the time when girls was running, and still, is how much is Allison Williams in on the joke?

We talked about this on stage at Tribeca, about how she figured out who she is, under the glare of all the cultural analysis of girls at the time, and just being the child of a famous person. Her dad is news anchor Brian Williams. And then after girls, Allison kept playing with self-presentation and how she expected audiences to read her.

And then she figured out how to still surprise them.

Like in her role in the movie, Get Out, where early on, her character assures her black boyfriend who's coming to meet her family that her parents are definitely not racist.

First of all, my dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have.

Like, the love is so real.

I'm only telling you that because he's definitely going to want to talk to you about that.

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